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The body ages. The body is preparing to die. No theory of time offers a reprieve here.

Death and time were always in alliance. Time took away more or less slowly: death more or less suddenly. Earlier, however, death was also thought of as the companion of life, as the precondition for that which came into Being from Non-being; one was not possible without the other. As a result, death was qualified by that which it could not destroy or by that which would return […]

The mainstream of modern thought has removed time from this unity and transformed it into a single, all-powerful and active force. 

In so doing it has transferred the spectral character of death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.


—John Berger 

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

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